Maddy had fantasized about watching it here, in Mile’s End, with her father beside her, but he had never seen even the rough cut. The shoot had taken place the January before, in Potter, a small town on the Vermont/Canada border, famed for its majestic Yarrow Lake. Her dad, on vacation from his teaching job, was the production’s unofficial mayor—doing carpentry, cooking big spaghetti dinners. Friends offered meals, homes, and locations for free, thrilled to have a movie shoot in town, no matter how low-budget.
The last time she had seen her dad was at the end of the shoot. He had hugged her tightly and pronounced, “I’ve said it before, but watching you up close, I really got it. This is what you were meant to do.” Though she thanked him, she wasn’t paying attention; Dan was worried about traffic and wanted to get on the road. She had since replayed that goodbye hundreds of times, wishing she’d said “I love you” or told him it was his faith that had made her dream big.
Maddy tried to focus on the screen, the second-unit shots of the Potter cornfields, the gas station, the country store, and a couple of old guys (real Potterians she’d known her whole life) smoking cigarettes on a porch. Finally, she saw herself, not herself but Alice, looking out the window and listening to headphones. It was bizarre to see her face blown up so big. All those moments spent in front of the camera—crying, inhabiting her body, fighting with Kira in character—were about to be made public and about to be judged.
It was amazing that the film had gotten written, much less made, given Dan’s mental state a year and a half ago. His most recent film, Closure, had been his third not to get distribution. He would complain about his day job, pouring beer in a Gramercy Park sports bar that he said catered to date rapists. He would stay up late watching European films, and he lost interest in sex. One night Maddy came home from her restaurant, La Cloche, to find him drunk on Jameson, watching Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee.
“You should write a movie we can shoot in Potter,” she said, squeezing next to him on their weathered green couch, “and I’ll act in it.”
They had been dating two years by that point but had never worked together. He hadn’t wanted to cast her in his other films, even though Closure had a well-drawn, troubled female lead; he said a collaboration could create stress in their relationship. Though hurt, she had decided not to fight him.
So she was surprised when he turned away from the TV and said, “What would the film be about?”
“What about the time I went to Lacey Rooney’s wedding?”
A childhood friend of Maddy’s, a girl up the road, had married a jerk. Maddy had gone home for the wedding, and the two friends had argued at the rehearsal dinner. Lacey thought she was a snob for wanting to act, and Maddy worried she was marrying a dangerous man. (Maddy had wondered what would happen when word got back to Lacey that they would be in Potter filming a movie based on their story, but Lacey, by then divorced, came to the set and posed for photos with Kira, joking that she herself was better-looking.)
As Maddy told Dan about Lacey that night, he listened, though he didn’t seem very excited. But when she came in the next night, he said, “I wrote eleven pages.” They read them aloud and Maddy talked more, gave some notes on the scenes. They continued to work this way until one night she arrived home from work and he handed her a thick sheaf of pages bound by paper fasteners. When she read it for the first time, with “story by Maddy Freed and Dan Ellenberg” and “screenplay by Dan Ellenberg” on the title page, she got giddy, thinking it could be a turning point for both of them. After an early reading of the screenplay, a former classmate of Dan’s commented, “It’s about that moment you realize the person you love most in the world is a stranger.”
For the first ten minutes, the Alpine Theater was quiet. She glanced down the row at her fellow actors. Ellen Cone, who played Maddy’s mother, clutched her own breast, an affectation that was either a reaction to the film or a result of living alone a long time. A snuffle emanated from one of the front rows. Maddy feared it had come from the Variety critic. As the movie went on and Kira had a funny bit with a dog, Maddy began to hear more laughs. Later, when the emotional pitch rose and the women had their big fight, the audience went silent.
When the end credits rolled over an indie-pop song, there was a long beat, and then the moviegoers began to applaud, a few at a time. The reviewers dashed out. Maddy tried to read their body language. Were they rushing to call long-lost childhood friends, or running late for their next screenings?
The house lights came on and the Know Her team went to the stage for the Q and A. Each chair had a bottle of water on it, and Maddy drank gratefully, feeling dizzy and hoping not to faint from the mountain altitude. Sharoz had informed Maddy that you had to be clever and witty at the panel discussions if you wanted people to spread the word about the film.
The moderator introduced the panel and Dan began fielding questions. A grandmotherly woman raised her hand. “Maddy, I was so impressed by your performance,” she said. Was she an agent? A financier? “What kind of training do you have?”
“Um, I studied at the New School,” Maddy said, and noticed, next to the woman, a young man nodding vigorously. It was Zack Ostrow. He had come. At ten in the morning. He was a man of his word. Maddy squinted to see if he was with his mother, but on his other side was a blond guy in a bulky parka. “I mostly do theater,” she continued, “but of course, Dan and I watch a lot of movies at home, so I had a good film education. I always tell people I studied at the Dan Ellenberg School of Filmmaking.”
“So you two are a couple?”
“Oh. Yeah,” Maddy said. “The film was shot in my hometown in Vermont, and Dan and I came up with the story together.”
Someone else asked if Dan considered it a women’s film. “Not at all,” he said. “I want my work to resonate with all kinds of people. I’m interested in human stories.”
Kira spoke into her mike. “Dan gave us a gift. He writes women so well, it’s almost like he has a vagina.” Everyone laughed. “And in a sense, he does. Maddy’s vagina.” They laughed harder. Maddy stiffened. She knew Kira wasn’t trying to upstage her, but Kira was easygoing and goofy, and Maddy knew she’d seemed remote by comparison. Or maybe the oxygen deprivation was turning her paranoid.
Kira had arrived late to her audition for I Used to Know Her, in a rented rehearsal room in midtown, just as Dan, Maddy, Sharoz, and their casting director were packing up to go. Kira said she had subway problems, and Maddy noticed that her makeup was smudged, either artfully or accidentally. Dan had already read sixty girls for Heather, the character based on Lacey, and was beginning to lose hope that he would be able to find the right actress.
Maddy had been turned off by Kira’s lateness, which felt unprofessional. But then they played the scene in which Heather and Alice argue on the rock where they used to go as children, and she was so brilliant and compelling that Dan cast her on the spot.
Another hand shot up, an overserious bony guy. “I’m wondering what the acting process was like for the two of you. Was there any improvisation?”